Hugucinogens

After a short read, the case is specifically “Steam is prohibiting developers from selling their games to other platforms, at a price lower than that of steam, and then pockets the 30% platform cost, due to effective monopoly power”.

Which, if true, is super bullshit.

Playstation should definitely be top - right lol

I mean, they didn’t bother you guys.

The guy was just cold, and the gal had a personal moment. Not their fault, that you two little kids were scared of strangers.

Kidding aside, and assuming what you’ve written is neither internet-talk nor standard schizophrenia tendencies, it might be carbon monoxide poisoning. It was a phenomenon, with haunted houses very often just having faulty heaters of some kind, causing hallucinations in the right doses.

Wait has this been a widespread issue? I’ve only noticed this a couple weeks now, but I thought it was because the cat dropped my deck from the table 😶

What’s going on actually?

I’m about 101% sure it’s possible, ±1.1%

Even to the (insufficient, overblown) extent that it happens, lifting “the poor” Han Chinese out of poverty by putting other populations (Uighurs) under slave labour instead, is not the moral win you’re implying.

If an ethnic cleansing is part of the requirements, to stop committing humanitarian atrocities towards “the poor”, that’s still an atrocity.

Disclaimer, the USA, just like every authoritarian state, is also disgusting and criminal.

I’m getting the sense that you didn’t actually watch the whole video, because your only two points in this comment,

In the absence of IP laws, creatives would be able to create their works, but they’d also be competing against companies that have the resources to monetize, influence the general public, and kill the franchise through poor choices.

And

It’s really important to know that the vast majority of people aren’t going to have the goodwill to tip or otherwise support free works, and it’s even less likely if a large company does enough marketing to overshadow an artist.

, are answered during the video, and I don’t see you arguing the points made by him, you’re just straight up stating the opposite.

And your first point,

Right now, a majority of creatives don’t own their IP in the legal sense, and they can’t stop large companies from milking their works dry as a result.

, is about how the current system doesn’t work to protect actual artists, yet does work to protect large IP-pimping companies.

“Reasonable control” is only possible in the legal sense, not the real sense, so I doubt artists care about it, outside of monetisation, which is what we’re attempting to replace.

Right now as we are speaking, the art of thousands upon thousands of those creators is being stolen constantly by legally gray AI scraping by huge companies, or illegally by smaller merch leeches.

The internet makes data protection impossible.

The law, only prevents the most egregious kinds of ‘monetisation with someone else’s art’, and is unable to stop the rest, for practical reasons.

If artists didn’t have to worry about being compensated enough… Would they still want to have “reasonable control”? Would we still “risk” them being “demotivated”, from being unable to forbid others specifically from making money with their ideas?

I think the human drive to create isn’t that neurotic. I think this kind of “demotivation” only happens for the kind of human who has been abused for years by the rules of the absurd economy we live in. And that’s what we’re saying should change.

Hey hey now. Don’t hate the companies themselves. They’re playing the legal game in the exact, only way the rules allow it to be played. If they don’t, the law and the shareholders fuck them up instead.

Edit: I guess tone is hard to convey through text, so let me be clear:

Companies bad.

But also:

Just hate the copyright law itself, directly. Its only reason for existence is so rich fucks get richer, safer, and should be just abolished.

(45 minute video by Uniquenameosaurus, who also has done an incredible series of videos on the practical ethics of media piracy, with a focus on anime as a jumping off point).

Honestly, it sounds to me like he just really wasn’t present in the moment.

I just cannot believe he would intentionally do such a thing, if he was aware of the entire situation, given your previous interactions. I might be projecting, (for I’ve been in such situations, and it was horrible for everyone involved), but I believe he was strongly tuned out somehow. Dissociated, either because of other things in his life at the time, or because of the date itself.

I think, no matter the cause, that’s still a bad sign for a date, he was not in a situation to pay attention to you, which was not a good thing at all.

If you feel some kind of empathy for that, or if you have any degree of interest, you could literally ask him. I think it’s good and proper to ask what was going on, about a time you were hurt, assuming you want further association with someone.

Otherwise, as a rule, I believe other people’s minds are kinda unknowable, and Very unreliable (we make mistakes all the fucking time), so I would not take it personally. I’d be willing to bet, it was not meant to be any kind of slight to you, or any intentional message. He probably just fucked up, and you should probably let it go, and move on.

To be clear, I don’t think there’s a right answer about whether you try to connect with him again or move on. Whichever you honestly feel you want, in your gut, is probably right.

I can’t advise you on anything that happened on the date itself, those are entirely yours and person-specific.

Assuming that you are not interested in anything with him at all, and just want to properly reject him, I strongly recommend not ghosting him fully, and instead give a kind but firm and clear rejection.

You don’t have to go into detail explaining. Especially after mutually keeping distance for that long, it’s clear that there was no spark between you, and you can just say something along those lines. “Sorry, I didn’t feel the chemistry, and I really feel like we don’t match. But I wish you happiness.”

For those last couple questions you ask… My opinion is that they’re are no rules.

1. Guys being expected to pay feels slimy to me, but paying itself can be good, like a gift, especially if you reciprocate and pay for something else another time.

2. The gal asking for what would make her happy in terms of which shop to go to… Should be an absolute given. If you feel like you’re not gonna have fun somewhere, recommend the better option, absolutely.

And also justified praise.

There could never be a story like Nier Automata on any medium outside of gaming, and there probably is no story like Nier Automata anywhere else in gaming right now.

Also, clicking robots is pretty fun.

Basically all this.

It’s become my primary gaming medium, and to be honest, it earned it’s price from the amount of time I initially spent setting up shit, which was a blast. Easily 50 hours of setup and installations before I clocked 10~20 hours of gaming, and I loved every second.